the misfortune of house of the dragon brainrot is that i remember shit from game of thrones and then i get mad and i was recently reminded of “robert’s rebellion was built on a lie” which makes me so unambiguously furious i’m finally gonna crack down and enumerate that fury to the rest of the populace in what may be my longest ramble to date. 

so, first things first, i’m gonna be so very brave and ignore the emotions and everything behind rhaegar running off with lyanna, ignore the skeeviness of this man in his midtwenties pursuing a young teenager and the skeeviness of doing it while married and how much of a dick fucking move that is to do to elia who didn’t deserve any of that from her shit husband, ignore whether or not rhaegar and lyanna were in love or if it was kidnapping or whatever, because that’s not important. 

what’s important is that the crown prince, the heir to the throne, next in line to the seat of power, committed an egregious offense against three major political powers. the foundational building block of robert’s rebellion isn’t about whether or not rhaegar and lyanna were “in love”, it’s about how rhaegar insulted house stark by taking a member of their family into custody in a way that puts her reputation at risk, he insulted house baratheon by taking someone who had been promised to a baratheon (it sounds awful to phrase it like that but this is how it would be seen in westerosi society), and he grievously insulted house martell by publicly shaming and humiliating a martell princess in a deeply embarrassing way. robert’s rebellion is built on rhaegar looking at his house’s allies and friends and essentially spitting on their faces. 

and even then, that’s not what kicks off robert’s rebellion. what the rhaegar and lyanna situation does is kick off the starks going to the crown, to the legal head of the country, and wanting the situation dealt with. brandon, though somewhat brashly, is well within his rights to go to his king and say that he and his family have been dealt a grievous offense and that it needs to be addressed and rectified in some way. aerys’s response to that is to kill two members of that family, brandon and rickard, in an unseemly and brutal way, all for using the proper channels available to them to try and find a way to address a problem, an insult being done to them and their family, and then after aerys murders them for it because the idea happens to offend him, because he’s nuts, he then demands that two people who haven’t done anything at all yet, another stark son and lyanna’s baratheon fiancé, be handed over to him to also be executed.

what happens to brandon and rickard isn’t the only thing that’s seen as morally bankrupt in the eyes of westeros, it’s also aerys ordering that jon arryn break faith and hand over two teenagers who haven’t done anything or started any conflict themselves because they are also part of the wronged parties from his own son’s apparent fuck up. that is what causes jon arryn to summon his banners. that is what robert’s rebellion was built on, aerys’s actions following rhaegar’s. because aerys has, in modern parlance, broken the social contract (for anyone who isn’t as big a dork as i am about historical politics, the social contract is a theory/model that argues that individuals consent to be ruled by an authority and trade away certain freedoms in exchange for the remainder of those rights being protected in a safe and maintained social order, and that when a ruler breaks that promise by becoming too despotic or creating a breakdown in the social order, the populace is no longer beholden to uphold their end as well in consenting to be governed). 

now, westeros doesn’t have a solid concept of the social contract because that’s something that only became a talked about thing during our age of enlightenment (mid 1600s to early 1800s AD) it’s a pseudo-medieval society, roughly equivalent to, like, the 800s AD (given that the doom of valyria is meant to be this world’s equivalent to the fall of the roman empire, which happened in 400 AD, while the doom happens about 400 years before the events of asoiaf). but there’s clearly some element of “we will allow ourselves to submit to your rule on the condition that you be good to us as a ruler, or else we will no longer allow said rule”, because that’s the entire basis for northern independence in the main books. the northerners believe that joffrey, in executing ned so suddenly and unceremoniously, on what are largely viewed to be trumped up charges, has broken the baratheon line’s social contract with the north, and thus do not need to uphold their own end of the contract, thereby declaring rebellion and fighting against that regime. and that’s what happens with robert’s rebellion. the arryns, starks, and baratheons have decided that, through the actions of it’s head (aerys) and it’s second in command (rhaegar), house targaryen has broken it’s side of the social contract, which means they no longer have to consent to be ruled by house targaryen, and will fight against house targaryen’s actions against them at that point. 

robert’s rebellion was not, and never had been, built on the idea that lyanna wasn’t in love with rhaegar. that might have been robert’s own personal motivation, but that didn’t factor into the rebellion at large. robert’s rebellion was built on the really bad decisions made by prominent political actors in westeros, and how everyone responded to them. the main issue was that a group of powerful people saw that the other side of the social contract had violated that contract, decided to react, then everyone else chose sides based on who they supported in that decision and promptly duked it out for a year until one side ultimately won. 

and man does that one line really encapsulate that season 8 gets the brunt of the backlash for being unbearably awful but basically everything that happened from them taking main control away from the books onward was just the height of stupidity, in every way.